The present disclosure relates generally to processing, acquiring, and providing media content for real-time media broadcast.
Many broadcast systems developed before the Internet use specialized technology. A typical example is producing live telecasts of sporting events. Typically, a game is being played inside of a stadium and outside of that stadium is a mobile unit, a truck, or sometimes more than one truck. The truck has cables running in and out of it from various points in the stadium, typically from high fidelity cameras that are located around the stadium. The cables are often fiber optic cables that are bringing digital video signals from very high fidelity cameras. The data is often in an SDI (Serial Digital Interface) format and is provided to a port of a computer or other device in the truck. Graphics are super-imposed over the video by crews in the trucks.
With the rise of social media, users desire to communicate and share information related to content that they watch. Often times, users may want to share content with others to supplement content they are viewing from a broadcast distribution. Such user content may be referred to as “user-generated content” (UGC) or as user-created content (UCC), representing any form of content including posts, chats, tweets, podcasts, digital images, video, audio files, advertisements and other forms of media. Viewers of broadcasts who wish to participate in communication via social media channels are challenged with ways to share UGC with other users. For many users having a mobile device, the users are able to easily capture content, but are not able to share such content, in real-time, with other users who happen to be viewing the same content via a broadcast transmission. Burst, Inc. of Boston developed techniques for sharing media content—essentially a collaborative platform for creating, viewing, editing and publishing digital content in real time. Broadcast distributors may be challenged with enabling delivery of UGC from users during a broadcast.
It would be desirable to provide ways for content to be shared in real-time with broadcast distribution.